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Trendrr – Daylife mashup

I saw a demo of Trendrr at the Apr 1st New York Tech meetup. Seemed like an easy way to throw all your data at one place and get some graphs in basic layouts (line,bar,area charts). Mark Ghuneim well utilized his 5 minute demo slot to show what trendrr can do and how their users have used their API. The best graph I liked was the one tracking someone’s CPU usage. You can then embed these graphs anywhere you want or export the data as xml, json or even an excel spreadsheet.

Its always tricky to keep things simple and introduce advanced features. The graph currently is exported as an image. If it could be exported as HTML, I would love to have the capability to click on the data point and go to the real source of that data. In that case, the trendrr API will need to accept a link along with each data point. The timeline widget on the daylife.com topic pages support similar functionality.

The delay between sending the data through the API and it showing up on the graphs is pretty significant. It would be great if does not take more than a minute.

Read more below about how I implemented the mashup of Trendrr and Daylife APIs.

The Trendrr API is a simple HTTP GET request with a very few parameters sent in the query string.

c. Select the time scale for your graph. I left the it to be the default 2 weeks. Once you have submitted this information, you get an API key for this particular graph/dataset. You then use this key in the API call above.

d. Collect your data. I wrote a php script that would take ‘Hillary Clinton’ (or any other topic) as an input and get the number of mentions for her in news per day in the last 14 days from the Daylife API.

e. Send that data to trendrr to track on the graph I just created for Hillary by calling the trendrr API. So now I have a trend graph for Hillary’s coverage in news in the last 2 weeks.

Here is my script that you can use to create your own trends using the Daylife API: